


just highly improbable

by thesmokinggnu



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Character Study, Freeform, Gen, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-08-25
Updated: 2014-08-25
Packaged: 2018-02-14 16:52:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2199534
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesmokinggnu/pseuds/thesmokinggnu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'd always wanted to travel the world, but it seems all she does is watch it end.</p>
            </blockquote>





	just highly improbable

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry I wrote this in a bit of a rush, any mistakes are mine.

“It’s not the end of the world, you know. What you have to remember is that no matter how bad things are, life goes on. It always does.”

The words are kindly meant, but in the damp grey morning it doesn’t matter and she pulls away from the unwanted weight of a hand on her shoulder.

At seven years old a tumour is the worst sort of monster she can imagine. An unseen malign presence that snatches her mother without ever showing its face makes the Halloween costumes and ghost stories seem almost comforting with their tangible presence. When she was younger she had to sleep with the light on, but now she is not scared of the dark.

  
  
*

  
Her father worried about her and she learned to be good at projecting. She did well in school, had a few good friends and was officially above average. Clara’s teachers told her dad that she was conscientious and well behaved and that he didn’t have to worry. She’d told him that herself of course but she noticed the way the lines around his eyes relaxed when he heard it from an adult.

She reads voraciously and indiscriminately. The words help to shake off the sense of dislocation hovering over her; like the feeling when you discover a word that describes perfectly a sensation or a thought that you thought was yours alone; the realisation that with seven billion variations of the human condition you’re never truly alone. 

 

*

  

She dreams in blazing colours, vivid and brutal; there’s a man with no name and his coat tails swirl in scorching solar winds.

 

*

 

Nina has black hair and a nose stud and laughs like she knows you’re only holding king-high.

Clara wonders in a panic whether she’s been reading the wrong books.

 

*

 

Clara is 24 years old and it’s a sunny Friday at the end of March when a man sets up a camp chair outside her window. He reminds her of a cartoon character clowning in his oversized boots and bow tie, waving his hands around like he’s trying to scoop up the world and offer it out to her.

 

 

That night she dreams of snow and wolves; moonlight on clouds and a girl in a red dress pounding over cobbles in bare feet.

 

*

 

The machine is a million voices pounding in her head, screaming and crying and begging and pleading and she can’t think and his voice is there like a single thread among the cacophony but his face is blur and she can’t remember what it feels like to breathe -

 

There’s smoke pouring out of the Shard behind her and the strange, impossible man tugs her gently through the gathering crowds. She squints against the daylight reflected on the glass of the skyscraper while colours and voices swirl inextricably around her. Her heart’s still thudding but she’s not scared now, not at all, and it’s as though a crack in the world has opened up and secrets and magic and conspiracies are spilling out and she’s floating on a tide of all the impossibilities escaped from the pages of a novel.

 

*

 

There’s a market on Akhaten. A week after Clara comes back her grandmother receives a small gold pyramid in the post. Clara tells her Nina sent it from Egypt.

 

*

 

Sometimes she catches him staring at her. She lets her fingers trail over the console while his gaze burns into her cheek. She doesn’t ask him about it because after a week she’s already learned the futility of that; of questioning this man who wears his secrets like medals, jangling as he walks with that look in his eye like a shark towards a sinking ship.

When he flirts with her it feels like an act. There’s no conviction in his voice and he sounds half as though he’s reciting lines he’s heard somewhere else. Other times it’s as though he’s not even talking to her at all, and she has to glance around just to make sure they’re really alone.

So Clara lets him stare, this man who carried her away from home (less of a rescue and more of a taxi ride), and watches him right back. He doesn’t seem to notice. There are moments when he appears to forget she’s there and his face sort of quietens, the frown lines falling away yet strangely he looks older without them.

He is selfish anger and regret and empathy duct taped together trying to be a human being, and in the right lighting she can see the cracks.

 

*

 

Trenzalore. The stars above them are going out; all those planets and continents and people she will never know or see. She wonders whether they’re scared, whether they have time to blink in terror before their sun consumes them. How quickly does a star die? The endless sky stretches above her and from this distance it almost looks peaceful. She breathes in and breathes out. After all, it’s nothing she hasn’t done before.

  
*

 

The world seems to end alarmingly often.

 

*

 

Her life (and her heart) is hers to give, and not his to save. Artie and Angie will always have a place in it, and she likes to think that Nina has a piece tucked in her enormous rucksack somewhere on the other side of the world. (The other side of Earth). Clara steps out into the grey light of Lancashire on Christmas Day and by the time she whirls around in fury the TARDIS is already disappearing.

Clara clings to the small metal key with everything she has. She decided a long time ago that she is not someone who loses people.  
She can’t feel anything in the time vortex but cold that reaches right through her skin to grip her heart and encase her throat. It last for ever and is over in an instant and as soon as she turns away she forgets all about it.

(She notices afterwards that there’s a white scar left on her right hand. It always itches when it’s going to snow).

 

*

 

A stranger stares at her across the TARDIS console. The air crackles around him and there's a faint smell of burning rubber.

“Who are you? Where am I?!”

Finally, she thinks they might be on the same page.

 

*


End file.
